The word is derived from the Danish word "fokken" to breed
cattle and Swedish "fokka" to copulate. I have had classes on
ren history and in truth yes the F-word does mean Fornication
Under Consent of the King, but it was ingraved in the entry
ways of brothels, it ment that the brothel was legal and paid
taxes. Henry the 8th made prostitution legal and taxed it in
order to make more money.

Actually the word "fuck" has nothing to do with Kings or
their consent to have sex. Fuck is an Old English word which
means "to sow a seed" (as in farming). "To sow" means to
scatter seeds, similar to the process of a male ejaculating
in to a female.

Popular etymologies agree, unfortunately incorrectly, that
this is an acronym meaning either Fornication Under Consent
of the King or For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The latter
usually accompanying a story about how medieval prisoners
were forced to wear this word on their clothing.

Deriving the etymology of this word is difficult, as it has
been under a taboo for most of its existence and citations
are rare. The earliest known use, according to American
Heritage and Lighter, predates 1500 and is from a poem
written in a mix of Latin and English and entitled 'Flen
flyys.' The relevant line reads:

"Non sunt in celi quia fuccant uuiuys of heli." Translated:
"They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the
wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge]." The word was not in
common (published) use prior to the 1960s.

Shakespeare did not use it, although he did hint at it for
comic effect. In Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) he gives us
the pun "focative case." In Henry V (IV.iv), the character
Pistol threatens to "firk" a French soldier, a word meaning
"to strike," but commonly used as an Elizabethan euphemism
for fuck. In the same play (III.iv), Princess Katherine
confuses the English words
"foot" and "gown" for the French "foutre" and "coun" (fuck
and cunt, respectively) with comic results. Other poets did
use the word, although it was far from common. Robert Burns,
for example, used it in an unpublished manuscript.

The taboo was so strong that for 170 years, from 1795 to
1965, fuck did not appear in a single dictionary of the
English language. In 1948, the publishers of The Naked and
the Dead persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism "fug"
instead, resulting in Dorothy Parker's comment upon meeting
Mailer: "So you're the man who can't spell fuck."

The root is undoubtedly Germanic, as it has cognates in other
Northern European languages: Middle Dutch fokken meaning to
thrust, to copulate with; dialectical Norwegian fukka meaning
to copulate; and dialectical Swedish focka meaning to strike,
push, copulate, and fock meaning penis. Both French and
Italian have similar words, foutre and fottere respectively.
These derive from the Latin futuere.

While these cognates exist, they are probably not the source
of fuck, rather they probably come from a common root. Most
of the early known usages of the English word come from
Scotland, leading some scholars to believe that the word
comes from Scandinavian sources. Others disagree, believing
that the number of northern citations reflects that the taboo
was weaker in Scotland and the north, resulting in more
surviving usages. The fact that there are citations, albeit
fewer of them, from southern England dating from the same
period seems to bear out this latter theory.

There is also an elaborate explanation that has been
circulating on the internet for some years regarding English
archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew!
This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However,
there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it's
virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index
and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a
reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the
middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of
cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers
would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture,
showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew
part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the
middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred
to in classical Greek and Roman texts.

> -----Original Message-----> From:
DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net [mailto:
DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net]> Sent: Thursday, 6 May 2004 2:13 PM> To:
rara-avis@icomm.ca> Subject: RARA-AVIS: words you now can say on TV, at
least on cable>> I heard someone commenting on all of the "dirty
words" on Deadwood. He> wasn't disapproving, actually said he found them
amusing, but claimed> they were not historically accurate for the 1870s.
He specifically> listed fuck, cunt, cocksucker and "cutting the
cheese." Now I know fuck> goes back further than this. The earliest use of
cunt I know of is in> Jelly Roll Morton's 1928 recording of Murder Ballad,
but it didn't sound> like he was making up a new word, so I'm sure it's
much older than that.> Although it's been some time since I've read it, I
seem to remember Jack> Black (no, not the one in Tenacious D, who reign
supreme, and School of> Rock) using cocksucker in I Can't Win. Wasn't that
from the early 20th> century? Plus I've got to figure that if cowboys
were paying for it in> whorehouses, they had to have a name for it. I have
no idea how old> "cut the cheese" is.>> Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had a slang
dictionary that might> gives dates for when these words entered the
language.>> Mark>> --> # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't
show up.> # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say
"unsubscribe rara-avis" to> # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the
digest version.> # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
.

--
# Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up.
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .